Such A Disadvantage

BY: Lauren Miller

So today I had my first full weekend day off of the new school semester. And for once I didn't have a concert planned. While it would have been smart of me to plow through some reading. Or maybe clean my room. I did neither of these things. Instead I sat and finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time, ever (seriously). I'm not even lying. I've never read the Harry Potter books before. And really I've only seen bits and pieces of all but like the first three movies. I know, how am I a kid of the nineties, right?

When I was younger I was one of those children who wasn't aloud to read Harry Potter. And really I had no real interested in the books. Nor did I have an interest in the movies until one day a few months ago when I had nothing better to do but sit down and watch a bit of the Harry Potter weekend on ABC Family. Like I said I only caught maybe three movies, but damn were those movies great! The imagination that not only J.K. Rowling needed to create the stories and the scenes and the people, but that the watcher (and reader) needed to sink their eyes and minds into these stories is incredible. Seriously, I hadn't been in such a state of wonderment towards a story in such a long time.The same goes for the books, which is definitely why I spent an entire afternoon in Hogwarts. But I feel like something was missing.

I have this rule to never see a movie based on a book until I read the book unless the book is something I absolutely know I'm never going to read. I feel like I want to create my own characters and scenes and such in my head with the aid of the author's pen, not Hollywood's lens. I find it interesting and an exercise for the imagination (woah, deep phrase there!) to imagine said things with my own imagination. In the end I find it fun to compare my vision with the movie's vision. But, of course, for Harry Potter I was at a disadvantage for my imagination. While my images were much more cartoony than the live action movie, the characters of Harry, Ron, and Hermione looked very much like Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. I just feel like I was at a disadvantage for reading this book. Hopefully after I get through books two and three I will finally enter some story line territory that will be new to me so I can still have a little bit of fun with imagining my own Hogwarts adventures, as told by J.K. Rowling.

And hopefully I can be a little more proactive for this Hunger Games series!

Does anyone else not like seeing a movie before they read a book? Let me know below!